It's hard to remember clearly, here are the things that stick out to me:
DD11:
Loved being read to at a very young age and clearly had several books memorized, which I realized because she would giggle or make motions in anticipation of the next page. Somewhere slightly before or after her first year she could retrieve books by title.
I remember her spelling before she was reading, sometime around two years old, and she was writing with some reasonable phonetic approximation at age three (like a typical late K/early 1st).
The next clear memory I have is her first completely independent chapter book sometime during age 4--I mostly remember because it was a Junie B. Jones and when I poked my head in and asked how the book was, she said (with great big eyes) "Not Good....". I asked if the book was too hard and she said, "No...Junie is being
naughty .
Despite her independence (she devoured books), we also continued to read together every night through 5th grade, which is actually how I realized how precocious she was. It wasn't so much what she could read on her own (which was pretty much everything), it was the comments she made about what we were reading together that really struck me as unusual.
DS9:
He was completely different. Very visual, kinesthetic kid. His biggest pre-K interests were non-fiction videos which he would watch and then act out with toys afterwards. He mostly wanted non-fiction read aloud too, which I hated. He was reading some before he started kindergarten (probably first grade level?) but was not an enthusiastic independent reader.
He was in early first when he hit the assessment point my daughter hit in kindergarten (which maxed out the assessment being used at the time). He is not a kid who often goes and seeks out a book to read, but loves read alouds and if he starts reading, will become immersed for a really long time. So he's a kid who read HP in 2nd grade, but once he would finish a book or a series, he wouldn't necessarily pick another one up. DD leaves the library with 15 books, DS leaves with 2-3. Yet he surprised me by testing much higher than I would have expected on the SRI, so go figure....
Other things that get in the way of him reading long books are interest in pictures (spends as much time looking at the pictures as reading the text), and a tendency to re-read a line or jump down 2 lines instead of one when he reaches the right hand side of the page and has to start again at the left, especially with small print.
My DS always loved the pictures too, but in the long run that hasn't interfered with his reading ability (decoding or comprehension). Especially in picture books, there is a lot of information contained in the pictures that enhances the story and is not part of the text. I think it is what builds the ability for kids to turn words into visuals. I've noticed that as he's gotten older, he will sometimes slip into very detailed descriptions of how he imagines a character or setting in a book he is reading.
Graphic novels have really exploded if you are looking for something else. There is actually as much non-fiction as fiction. It's not a format I particularly enjoy, but it has high appeal to kids who love visuals. In some cases there are graphic versions of great novels--I wouldn't ever feed a child the graphic version first, but it could be a fun independent follow up to a read aloud of the original.
